Dec. 6, 1913. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
711 
O F the four seasons in Canada the one, 
par excellence, to my mind is the “fall,” 
when the forests are carpeted thickly 
with leaves and the few trees that are already 
bare seem to say to the sportsman that time is 
short and in a month or two, perhaps less, the 
swish-swish of the traveller’s footsteps will be 
exchanged for the silent scrunch of the snow. 
Even the birds, of which Canada is strangely 
deficient, whisper the same warning and the wild 
canaries, as they flit past my camp, seem anxious 
to tell me that though they are here to-day they 
will be gone to-morrow. 
My camp is an old log hut on the edge of a 
lake fringed with pine, spruce and balsam. Who 
built it I cannot say. Perhaps the man who lies 
so still under the rude wooden cross on the other 
side of the path. There are only initials on the 
cross, but no date, and the grave is thickly cov¬ 
ered with leaves of gold and bronze and red. 
Surely no man could wish for a more peaceful 
resting-place. 
The Province of Quebec 
By W. SULLIVAN 
For a perfect “rest cure” there is nothing to 
beat a lake in the Canadian woods. 
Above me some woodpeckers are hard at 
work perforating a pine; at intervals one of them 
looks over his wing as if suspicious of my bona 
tides; a little red squirrel on an adjacent branch 
pauses in the act of biting a wild raspberry and 
with a flirt of his tail disappears round the trunk 
of a tree. He, at any rate, has no illusions about 
humans, be they anglers or otherwise, for even 
fishermen have been known to carry guns. Away 
in the lake a big trout rises with a swirl, while 
close to the bank a black and white kingfisher 
hovers in the air and then drops “plunk” like a 
stone into the water, emerging immediately with 
a small fish in his beak. 
The forest-clad mountains rise sheer above 
me—sombre and gloomy—silent also, except for 
the sharp click of the lumberman’s axe and the 
voice of the man in charge of the log-hauling. 
It is a pretty sight to watch this man and 
his horse. As the logs are cut they are hauled 
down to the lake, the horse working solely by 
the sound of his master’s voice, turning to the 
right or left as the case may be and halting when 
told to. 
A lumber camp is well worth a visit. After 
the harvest is over hundreds of men are thrown 
out of work on the farms and were it not for 
the lumber camps many of these would find it 
hard to live through the six months of winter. 
Supplies are hauled to the camp from the 
nearest town, mostly pork and beans, tea, coffee 
and such like, and the men soon settle down to 
the simple life of the woods. 
I paid a visit to one of these camps and in 
spite of the fact that my knowledge of French 
is limited, I enjoyed it much. When the men 
returned for dinner at noon I sat next to my 
friend “Trop Petit,” who stands somewhere in 
the neighborhood of six feet and six inches, and 
he helped my tin-plate liberally—too liberally— 
with pork and beans and larded potatoes. 
Talk about appetites! dish after dish van¬ 
ished as if by magic, washed down by copious 
draughts of strong green tea—stewed, not brewed 
—and destitute of milk. I came to the conclu¬ 
sion that “M. Jean,” the camp cook, fully earned 
what had seemed to me his high wages of two 
dollars a day. 
Close to my camp a little stream tumbles into 
the lake, fringed on either side by forests of 
pines and white birch. In the fall it is an an¬ 
gler’s paradise, for when the big fish in the lake 
are not rising one can wander for miles under 
the shade of the trees and return in the evening 
with a creel-full of brook trout—small—the most 
of them not more than half a pound, but none 
the less welcome for that. And then show me 
the man who could want a more delightful meal 
than freshly caught trout cooked under the trees. 
Sullivan County 
The breeding season was a good one and 
the broods of young ruffled grouse were quite 
full, but in many coverts feed was scarce. The 
birds seemed to be badly scattered early in Octo¬ 
ber and were difficult to locate in the section I 
worked in, yet a few miles away very fair sport 
was enjoyed. The flight of woodcock began well, 
but during the best of the October moon the 
weather was warm and muggy. If I had been 
blessed with a pair of seven-league boots, or a 
small, light motor car, I know that I could have 
found plenty of grouse, but being without either 
of these, I confess to many disappointments. 
We have had abundant moisture from the 
sky and one or two heavy freshets. The last 
high water right in the spawning season; as the 
native trout were hard at work and the brown 
trout just coming onto the redds. More large 
fish than usual are spawning in exposed locations 
as they ran up on the flood and remained in the 
bennie-kills after the water fell. There are per¬ 
sons who can not resist the temptation to kill a 
really big trout when practically at their mercy, 
no matter how poor its condition. 
There is a very good show of fish and we 
trust that all will go well. One excellent spawn¬ 
ing ground was spoiled by sawdust dumped from 
a mill that had been moved from place to place. 
The weather has been unusual, to say the least. 
Cold wilds and snow gave place to a week of 
summer-like days late in November. 
It is not worth while to prognosticate, but 
we hope that the winter will be favorable for 
game and fish. 
A great many men and boys are devoting 
their attention to trapping, as all furs are very 
high in price. Only a few are skillful, yet the 
total catch of foxes, minks, coons, muskrats, 
weasels and skunks is very large. Where all the 
skunks repose during the day is a puzzle to me 
as T do not find many holes. 
I saw 400 skunk skins at one farm near the 
line of the 0 . & W. R. R., all collected from a 
small district by the farmer’s son (by trapping 
and purchase). This was four years ago. 
Theodore Gordon. 
Sullivan County, N. Y., November. 
Indian Methods 
Wayne, Pa., Nov. 24 . —Editor Forest and 
Stream: Archers and anthropologists all over 
the world are now presented with an opportunity 
to solve definitely and forever a question which 
has been discussed without result for the last 
generation That is, the method that our Indi¬ 
ans used in making chipped stone weapons. 
Here is “Ishi the Archer,” a genuine man of the 
stone age, the only real paleolithic gentleman in 
our country, who, according to Dr. Pope, makes 
obsidian arrow points which he “flakes most 
beautifully.” For the sake of science let us 
have from Dr. Pope a good article on how he 
does it. Let him illustrate every step of the pro¬ 
cess by photographs and spare no words or space 
to make it clear to us all in every detail. 
Yours truly, 
Robert P. Elmer. 
October Birds 
Hanna City, Ill., Nov. 23 .—Editor Forest 
and Stream: Am sending you a list of all the 
birds seen about my home during the month of 
October. A total of thirty-four hundred and ten 
birds were seen. Following is the list, including 
fifty different species: Nineteen red-winged 
blackbirds, 61 blackbirds, 142 bluebirds, six car¬ 
dinals, 12 black-capped chickadees, 5 cowbirds, 1 
brown creeper, 217 American crows, 1 yellow- 
billed cuckoo, 5 mourning doves, 33 flickers, 172 
American goldfinches, 5 purple grackles, 1 marsh 
hawk, 17 hawks, 2 night hawks, 2 red-tailed 
hawks, 8 American sparrow hawks, 102 bluejays, 
138 slate-colored juncoes, 49 prairie horned larks, 
50 meadow larks, 1 phoebe, 122 quails, 78 Ameri¬ 
can robins, 16 sparrows, 1,327 English sparrows, 
21 field sparrows, 14 song sparrows, 5 vesper 
sparrows, 11 white-throated sparrows, 5 swal¬ 
lows, J barn swallow, 2 brown thrashers, 1 tufted 
titmouse, 4 warblers, 12 myrtle warblers, 1 cedar 
waxwing, 61 wild ducks, 390 wild ducks or wild 
geese, 4 kinglets, 5 golden-crowned kinglets, 5 
ruby-crowned kinglets, 1 owl, 2 screech owls, I 
own, 4 unknown, 12 downy woodpeckers, 5 hairy 
woodpeckers, 2 red-bellied woodpeckers, 13 red¬ 
headed woodpeckers, and 1 winter. All of the 
above list were seen either in the village of Han¬ 
na City or in the surrounding country nearby. 
Hope you will be able to make use of this. 
John B. Behrends. 
